This is a archived copy of a text written by Peter Faasse,
and later turned into nice html on a web page created by
Wesley Moore,
October, 1999. Wesley's page has been hosted at
RMIT University.
This archive was made on March 31, 2000, to prepare for the
event where RMIT removes Wesley's pages, perhaps when he leaves
the university. Wesley has done a very nice job of turning
Peter's original text file into a nice HTML document. It would
be a shame if the only copy were to be suddently removed from
the net.

Some time ago I have dropped that I had connected an IDE harddisk
to one of my microcontrollers. This has provoked a response that
I had not foreseen. Since that day I have received some one to two
e-mails a day requesting more details about what I had done. At
first I have mailed a more or less cryptic description of my
interface to some of the requestors. That only resulted in more
e-mail asking for more details. As it seems some people out there
are really interested in how my contraption is made. In this
description I will attempt to satisfy the information-hunger of
all you out there who's appetite I seem to have awakened.

This interface first came to my mind when I re-read some old, old
computer magazines. In one of them, the German magazine called
C't there was a short description of how and IDE interface is put
together. This is in the November issue of 1990. The article
describes an IDE interface for both the PC-XT(!) and the PC-AT.
The circuit diagrams of the article indicate that the hardware of
an IDE interface is in fact very simple. It is essentially a data
bus extension from the PC-AT bus to an IDE device. For a PC the
hardware comes down to some bus buffers and some decoding. When a
disk is connected as an IDE device the PC-AT still 'sees' the
old-type control registers of the ancient MFM disk controller. In
the article the entire interface is implemented using simple TTL
chips. The main problem in a PC seems to be how to keep the
harddisk interface and the floppy interface from colliding on
some register addresses. If the IDE interface is implemented
based on some controller system this is of course no problem.

>From a controller point of view an IDE interface could be
described as a set of I/O ports. The IDE interface has a 8/16
bits I/O bus, two /CS lines, a /WR and /RD line, three address
bits and one interrupt. In this description I assume the most
traditional IDE interface. In later IDE interfaces a series of
nice so-called PIO modes where added. These PIO modes add things
like a ready line, DMA facilities and higher speed data
transfers. As you read on you will understand that I only use the
so-called PIO mode 0. This is the slowest communication modus on
an IDE bus. It is also the easiest one to implement. The data bus
on an IDE interface is used mostly for 8-bits transfers. Only the
real disk data reads and writes use the 16-bits bus in full
width. You COULD even implement an IDE interface with an 8-bits
only data bus. That would mean that you use only half the disk
capacity (the lower bytes of the 16-bits-wide bus) but that
should work.

When scanning the net I did find an implementation of an IDE
interface for 8-bit controllers. This interface was for a (hope I
have this correct..) CoCo bus. It was implemented in TTL, just
like the magazine's interface. The main idea was that whenever a
(16-bits) word was read from the IDE bus the upper 8 bits where
stored in a latch. The controller could retrieve them from the
latch later. Writing to the IDE bus was implemented in the same
manner. The IDE bus read/write cycles where in fact simple bus
read and write cycles. At first I was about to copy this design.
When thinking about it I thought that this TTL design was too
complex for what I wanted to do. You need quite some TTL to
implement a 16-bits read/write I/O port in TTL on an 8-bits
controller.

When implementing a 16-bits I/O port all you need is a
bidirectional I/O port and some control bits to generate the /RD,
/WR etc... That is when the 8255 came in view. An 8255 has 3
8-bits I/O ports. It can be switched from output to input and
back under software control. I used 2 of the 8-bits I/O ports for
the data path and use port to generate the IDE control signals.
The 74HC04 came into the design later. Once I had the controller
and the 8255 strapped together with the IDE connector and a disk
I found out that the 8255 has a nasty trait. Whenever you switch
the I/O modus of the chip it resets ALL its memory bits. That
includes ALL output signals too. For the data bus that is not so
much of a problem. The control signals get a real shake when this
happens. In particular: The /RESET line of the interface is
activated. That makes all control of a disk on this interface
impossible (the disk gets a reset at all kinds of odd
moments...). I have solved this by simply inverting all the
control signals from the 8255 to the IDE bus. When the modus of
the 8255 is switched all outputs of the chip go to '0'. That
means that all the (low-active) control signals are made inactive
by the inversion. That is -in fact- the state where I have them
already when I'm about to change the 8255's modus.

At this point I would like to present a nice circuit diagram to
show what the contraption I have made looks like. Unfortunately I
know of no easy way to do that. This beautiful net is a marvel
when it comes down to transporting text, graphics is another
matter. A GIF picture would do the work; I do not have any means
to produce one. Some schematics drawing package could give a good
picture; I have no schematics package and I am not sure what
package would be universal enough to be useable by everyone. So I
am restricted to a more or less cryptic ASCII description of the
hardware. Please, the cryptology is out of need, not out of my
liking. Well here it comes:

pin no: name: function:
--------- ------- ---------
1 /RESET Al low signal level on this pin will reset
all connected devices
2,19,22 GND ground, interconnect them all and tie to
24,26,30 controller's ground signal
40
3,5,7,9,11 D7..D0 low data bus, 3=D7 .. 17=D0. This part of
13,15,17 the bus is used for the command and
parameter transfer. It is also used for
the low byte in 16-bits data transfers.
4,6,8,10 D8..D15 high data bus, 4=D8 .. 18=D15. This part
12,14,16,18 of the bus is used only for the 16-bits
data transfer.
20 - This pin is usually missing. It is used to
prevent mis-connecting the IDE cable.
21 and /IOREADY I do not use or connect to this pin. It is
27 there to slow down a controller when it is
going too fast for the bus. I do not have
that problem...
23 /WR Write strobe of the bus.
25 /RD Read strobe of the bus.
28 ALE Some relic from the XT time. I do not use
it, and I'm not the only one...
31 IRQ Interrupt output from the IDE devices. At
this moment I do not use it. This pin
could be connected to a controller to
generate interrupts when a command is
finished. I have an inverter ready for
this signal (I need a /IRQ for my
controller, an IRQ is of no use to me..)
32 IO16 Used in an AT interface to enable the
upper data bus drivers. I do not use this
signal. It is redundant anyway, the ATA-3
definition has scrapped it.
34 /PDIAG Master/slave interface on the IDE bus
itself. Leave it alone or suffer
master/slave communications problems. Not
used (or connected to ANYTHING) by me.
35 A0 Addresses of the IDE bus. With these
33 A1 you can select which register of the IDE
36 A2 devices you want to communicate.
37 /CS0 The two /CS signals of the IDE bus. Used
38 /CS1 in combination with the A0 .. A2 to select
the register on the IDE device to
communicate with.
39 /ACT A low level on this pin indicates that the
IDE device is busy. I have connected a LED
on this pin. The real busy signal for the
controller I get from the IDE status
register.

The signals:
A0, A1, A2, /CS0, /CS1, /WR, /RD and /RESET are always outputs
from the controller to the IDE bus.

The signals:
IRQ and /ACT are always outputs from the IDE bus to the
controller (IRQ can be tri-stated by the IDE device when two
devices are connected to the IDE bus.) /ACT can drive a LED (with
resistor of course).

The signals:
D0, D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7, D8, D9, D10, D11, D12, D13, D14,
D15 are bi-directional. They are output from the controller to
the IDE bus when writing, output from the IDE device to the
controller when reading information.

The 8255 is connected to the controller by means of its 8-bit
data bus, the A0 and A1 lines and the /CS, /WR and /RD lines. I
can not give that much info about this. If in doubt: consult the
8255 data sheet. This part depends as much on the controller you
use as anything else. I have the 8255 connected to my controller
(HD63B03R1CP, a Hitachi 6803-derivate..) as an I/O port. Perhaps
some of you have seen my previous e-mails asking for the pinout
of the HD63B03R1CP (52-pins PLCC) chip, well I did find it (Some
department of my work had an old Hitachi databook, voila the
pinout was there). My address decoding puts the 8255 on address
0500H to 0503H in the controller's memory map. That may help if
you decide to try to make sense of my software listing. On this
point you are on your own as to the how to connect a 8255 to your
controller.

I have used the 8255's port A to generate the IDE bus control
signals. Some of these control signals pass through an inverter
before I connected them to the IDE connector itself. All of these
signals are always used as output from the 8255 to the IDE bus.
When a control signal is inverted the 8255 pin is connected to
one of the inputs of the 74HC04 and the (corresponding) output of
the 74HC04 is connected to the IDE bus connector.

The ports B and C are used as the 16-bits data bus. There are no
special things in this, it's just a simple interconnection of the
8255 I/O pins to the D0..D15 pins of the IDE connector.

I have put a 10 KOhm pull-down resistor from the IDE bus IRQ to
ground. The IDE IRQ signal is also connected to the input of the
(one-remaining) inverter. The output of the inverter is connected
to the controller's /IRQ input. As you can see, I do have the
hardware for interrupts here, I do not use it. I tried to use it,
but got unexplained errors (I probably did something wrong, I
have not yet found what)..

The IDE /ACT signal is connected to a 330 Ohm resistor, the other
end of the resistor is connected to a LED, the other end of the
LED is connected to the +5 Volts. This gives a nice LED
indication of when I'm using the disk. This is -as far as I know-
the same hardware a PC uses to produce the disk busy LED you may
find on the front of a PC box.

The IDE device appears to the IDE bus as a set of registers. The
register selection is done with the /CS0, CS1 and A0, A1, A2
lines. Reading/writing is done with the /RD and /WR signals. I
have used the 8255 port A signals to make read/write cycles on
the IDE bus. What I do is the following:

4) activate the /WR of the IDE bus by setting the equivalent bit
in the port A of the 8255.

5) deactivate the /WR signal on the IDE bus by resetting the
equivalent bit of port A of the 8255.

The only difference between 8 bits and 16 bits transfers is the
following:

- In an 8-bit transfer I use only the port B of the 8255 for data
transfer. When writing I put data only on the lower byte of the
IDE bus; the upper byte is ignored anyway by the IDE device.
When reading I read only port B of the 8255; I never even
bother to look at the upper byte.

- In an 16-bit transfer I read/write to both the upper and the
lower byte of the IDE bus; thus using both port B and port C.

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2=A1=A0=0: data I/O register (16-bits)
This is the data I/O register. This is in fact the only 16-bits
wide register of the entire IDE interface. It is used for all data
block transfers from and to the IDE device.

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=001B: This is the error information
register when read; the write precompensation register when
written. I have never bothered with the write precompensation at
all, I only read this register when an error is indicated in the
IDE status register (see below for the IDE status register).

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=010B: Sector counter register. This
register could be used to make multi-sector transfers. You'd have
to write the number of sectors to transfer in this register. I
use one-sector only transfers; So I'll only write 01H into this
register. I do use this register to pass the parameter the
timeout for idle modus command via this register.

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=011B: Start sector register. This register
holds the start sector of the current track to start reading/
writing to. For each transfer I write the start sector in this
register. For some fancy reason the sector count starts at 1 and
runs up to 256, so writing 00H results in sector number 256. Why
that is done is a mystery to me, all other counting in the IDE
interface starts at 0.....

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=100B: Low byte of the cylinder number.
This register holds low byte of the cylinder number for a disk
transfer.

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=101B: High two bits of the cylinder
number. The traditional IDE interface allows only cylinder
numbers in the range 0..1023. This register gets the two upper
bits of this number. I write the cylinder number's upper two bits
into this register before each transfer.

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=110B: Head and device select register. The
bits 3..0 of this register hold the head number (0..15) for a
transfer. The bit 4 is to be written 0 for access to the IDE
master device, 1 for access to the IDE slave device. The bits
7..5 are fixed at 101B in the traditional interface.

/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=111B: command/status register. When
written the IDE device regards the data you write to this
register as a command. When read you get the status of the IDE
device. Reading his register also clears any interrupts from the
IDE device to the controller.

/CS0=1, /CS1=0, A2..A0=110B: 2nd status register/interrupt and
reset register. When read this register gives you the same status
byte as the primary (/CS0=0, /CS1=1, A2..A0=111B) status
register. The only difference is that reading this register does
not clear the interrupt from the IDE device when read. When
written you can enable/disable the interrupts the IDE device
generates; Also you can give a software reset to the IDE device.

/CS0=1, /CS1=0, A2..A0=111B: active status of the IDE device. In
this register (read-only) you can find out if the IDE master or
slave is currently active and find the currently selected head
number. In a PC environment you can also find out if the floppy
is currently in the drive. I have not used this register yet.

Some of these registers have bitwise meanings. I'll elaborate on
that here:

bits 3..0: head number [0..15]
bit 4 : master/slave select: 0=master,1=slave
bits 7..5: fixed at 101B. This is in fact the bytes/sector
coding. In old (MFM) controllers you could specify if
you wanted 128,256,512 or 1024 bytes/sector. In the
IDE world only 512 bytes/sector is supported. This bit
pattern is a relic from the MFM controllers age. The
bit 6 of this pattern could in fact be used to access
a disk in LBA modus.

Status register:
Both the primary and secondary status register use the same bit
coding. The register is a read register.

bit 0 : error bit. If this bit is set then an error has
occurred while executing the latest command. The error
status itself is to be found in the error register.
bit 1 : index pulse. Each revolution of the disk this bit is
pulsed to '1' once. I have never looked at this bit, I
do not even know if that really happens.
bit 2 : ECC bit. if this bit is set then an ECC correction on
the data was executed. I ignore this bit.
bit 3 : DRQ bit. If this bit is set then the disk either wants
data (disk write) or has data for you (disk read).
bit 4 : SKC bit. Indicates that a seek has been executed with
success. I ignore this bit.
bit 5 : WFT bit. indicates a write error has happened. I do
not know what to do with this bit here and now. I've
never seen it go active.
bit 6 : RDY bit. indicates that the disk has finished its
power-up. Wait for this bit to be active before doing
anything (execpt reset) with the disk. I once ignored
this bit and was rewarded with a completely unusable
disk.
bit 7 : BSY bit. This bit is set when the disk is doing
something for you. You have to wait for this bit to
clear before you can start giving orders to the disk.

This register has only two bits that do something (that I know
of). It is a write register.

bit 1 : IRQ enable. If this bit is '0' the disk will give and
IRQ when it has finished executing a command. When it
is '1' the disk will not generate interrupts.
bit 2 : RESET bit. If you pulse this bit to '1' the disk will
execute a software reset. The bit is normally '0'. I
do not use it because I have full software control of
the hardware /RESET line.

Active status register:
This is a read register. I have -up till now- ignored this
register. I have only one IDE device (a disk) on my contraption.

bit 0 : master active. If this bit is set then the master IDE
device is active.
bit 1 : slave active. If this bit is set then the slave IDE
device is active.
bits 5..2: complement of the currently active disk head.
bit 6 : write bit. This bit is set when the device is writing.
bit 7 : in a PC environment this bit indicates if a floppy is
present in the floppy drive. Here it has no meaning.

error register:
The error register indicates what went wrong when a command
execution results in an error. The fact that an error has
occurred is indicated in the status register, the explanation is
given in the error register. This is a read register.

bit 0 : AMNF bit. Indicates that an address mark was not
found. What this means I not sure of. I have never
seen this happen.
bit 1 : TK0NF bit. When this bit is set the drive was not able
to find track 0 of the device. I think you will have
to throw away the disk if this happens.
bit 2 : ABRT bit. This bit is set when you have given an
indecent command to the disk. Mostly wrong parameters
(wrong head number etc..) cause the disk to respond
with error flag in the status bit set and the ABRT bit
set. I have gotten this error a lot when I tried to
run the disk with interrupts. Something MUST have been
wrong with my interface program. I have not (yet)
found what.
bit 3 : MCR bit. indicated that a media change was requested.
What that means I do not know. I've ignored this bit
till now.
bit 4 : IDNF bit. Means that a sector ID was not found. I have
never seen this happen, I guess it means that you've
requested a sector that is not there.
bit 5 : MC bit. Indicates that the media has been changed. I
ignore this bit.
bit 6 : UNC bit. Indicates that an uncorrectable data error
happened. Some read or write errors could provoke
this. I have never seen it happen.
bit 7 : reserved.

Note: I have these registers descriptions from two sources:

1) The C't magazine I mentioned before. It's in German, not very
complete (the error register description is missing) and very
old. It does have a hardware description of and IDE interface
however....
2) The document X3T10/2008D: Information Technology-
AT Attachment-3 Interface (ATA-3), Working draft.
This latter document gives an exhaustive overview of the IDE
interface. It states more details of the IDE interface than I
can ever hope to include in this short description. It does
however have one disadvantage: it's BIG. I found the document
on the net (on the Western Digital homepage) in the form of an
.exe file. When you run this file on a PC you are rewarded
with a bigger-than-1 Mbytes .DOC file. That is a Word
document. When you print (Wondows-95 has a Word viewer/printer
application) it you get a nearly-200-pages paper. If you want
to get into the IDE interface seriously I recommend you print
this thing.

I hope the description I have given here will allow those that do
not have a laser printer and a fast internet link available to
get to grips with the IDE bus.

In the PC world there has been (and still is) a lot of discussion
about 'limits' in the disk interface.

At first (MSDOS versions till 3.3) the disk interface was not
able to access more than 32MB on one volume. That was a
limitation of the MSDOS file system rather than of the disk
interface. The same DOS version that was unable to access bigger
partitions than 32MB *WAS* able to access 650MB CDROMs. The limit
came from the fact that each disk sector (512 bytes) was
registered in the FAT in a 16-bits word. The total partition size
was limited by the fact that only 65536 sectors could be
addressed. The partition size was thus limited to 65536 x 512
bytes = 32 MBytes.

Later -as the disks became larger- the disk interface itself ran
into its limits. The interface I describe here has room for 16
heads, 256 sectors per track and only 1024 cylinders. With the
standard sector size of 512 bytes that leaves you a maximum disk
size of 16 x 256 x 1024 x 512 = 2048 MBytes. That is a real
limitation of the IDE interface as I describe it here. It can not
access more than some 2 GBytes of disk space.

This was overcome by introducing the so-called LBA modus. In LBA
modus the sectors are simply numbered from 0 to -big-. The lowest
byte of the LBA sector number is written into the sector number
register, the middle 16 bits of the LBA sector number are written
in the cylinder number registers (low and high, all 16 bits are
used). The highest 4 bits of the LBA sector number are written in
the head and device register. That gives you 28 bits of LBA
sector number. The sector size was again fixed at 512bytes, so in
LBA modus you have access to: 2^28 x 512 = 1.37 E 11 (some 137.4
gigabytes) of disk space. This LBA modus has been made mandatory
for all new disks (in the ATA-3 spec.) That should keep the disk
makers busy for some while to come... If you want to connect a
disk larger than 2 GBytes to this IDE interface you too will have
to use the LBA modus. How to do that: the bit 6 of the head and
device register is set to indicate that LBA modus is used (the
fixed pattern of 101B in the bits 7..5 of the head and device
register is to be changed into 111B). All other manipulation of
the IDE interface is the same for Sector/Head/Cylinder modus and
LBA modus.

All other limits in the MSDOS/Windows-whatever disk interface must
be due to the BIOS implementation or the file system used. I can
find no reason in the IDE definition for 512 MB limits or 8 GB
limits at all.

Ok, now you know what registers the IDE system uses. Next
question: How to use them? I do not pretend I have tried every
possibility with these registers. As I stated before I have
restricted myself to reading/writing data blocks to/from the
disk. What to do for that is in fact fairly simple:

1) Before doing anything with a device you have to wait till it
indicates that it is ready (RDY bit in the status register)
2) Next you load the parameters of a command into the appropriate
registers. For read/write commands that comes down to writing
the cylinder/head/sector numbers into the registers.
3) You issue a read or write command.
4) You wait till the device signals that it is ready for data
transfer (DRQ in the status register).
5) Feed the device data (for write) or get the data from the
device (for read). In case of a write you could wait for the
operation to complete and read the status register to find out
what has become of your data.
6) Finish!! That's all folks! The IDE interface is a surprisingly
simple thing to get to work. If only I had an IDE disk and this
kind of information when I was still programming my
MSX-computer I'd have had a harddisk connected to it in no
time.

What has been missing in this description till now is the command
set. I do not think I can describe the complete command set here.
The ATA-3 document is a better source for that than I can give
here (All I would be doing is re-entering the ATA-3 document; I
have neither the time nor any liking for that). The most useable
commands I do intend to describe. Mind: When giving a command you
first have to wait for device ready, next put the command
parameters in the registers and only then can you give a command
(by writing a command byte to the command register). The disk
will start executing the command right after you've written the
command into the command register.

IDE command: Description:
------------ ------------
1XH recalibrate the disk. NB: 1XH means that the lower
nibble of the command byte is a don't care. All
commands 10H..1FH will result in a recalibrate
disk command being executed. This command has no
parameters. You simply write the command code to
the command register and wait for ready status to
become active again.
20H Read sector with retry. NB: 21H = read sector
without retry. For this command you have to load
the complete circus of cylinder/head/sector
first. When the command completes (DRQ goes
active) you can read 256 words (16-bits) from the
disk's data register.
30H Write sector (with retry; 31H = without retry).
Here too you have to load cylinder/head/sector.
Then wait for DRQ to become active. Feed the disk
256 words of data in the data register. Next the
disk starts writing. When BSY goes not active you
can read the status from the status register.
7XH Seek. This normally does nothing on modern IDE
drives. Modern drives do not position the head if
you do not command a read or write.
ECH Identify drive. This command prepares a buffer
(256 words) with information about the drive. If
you want the details either look closely at the
interface program I will add at the end of this
description or get the ATA-3 document. To use it:
simply give the command, wait for DRQ and read
the 256 words from the drive. I have found that
the modern drives I used give nice information
about number of heads,sectors,cylinders etc...
One of the disks I tried (a Miniscribe 8051A)
gave wrong answers in this buffer. The disk is
actually a 4 heads/28 sectors disk. It should be
used in a translated modus with 5 heads/17
sectors. In the ident drive response it reported
as 4 heads/28 sectors and it will NOT work in
that modus. Two other disks (a Quantum 127 MB
disk and a Western Digital 212 MB disk) report
nicely. If not for the Miniscribe I would use the
parameters reported to auto-config the interface
to match the disk configuration.
E0H Spins down the drive at once. No parameters. My
Miniscribe 8051A does not respond to this
command, the other disks do execute this command.
E1H Spins up the drive again. Same remarks as E0H
command.
E2H and E3H Auto-power-down the disk. Write in the sector
count register the time (5 seconds units) of
non-activity after which the disk will spin-down.
Write the command to the command register and the
disk is set in an auto-power-save modus. The disk
will automatically spin-up again when you issue
read/write commands. E2H will spin-down, E3H will
keep the disk spinning after the command has been
given. Example: write 10H in the sector count
register, give command E2H and the disk will
spin-down after 80 seconds of non-activity. BTW:
You can use this command easily on a PC disk too.
The harddisk of the computer I am working on now
gets this exact command at boot. That saves a lot
of noise when I'm typing long stories like this
one.
F2H and F3H The same as E2H and E3H, only the unit in the
sector count register is interpreted as 0.1 sec
units. I have not tried this command. I think it
will work (the E0H/E1H/E2H/E3H commands work, why
should this one not work?)

The IDE bus is intended for two devices. A master and a slave
device. I have not tried anything myself, but the descriptions
indicate that it is in fact very simple to connect two devices to
the IDE bus. All you have to do is:

1) Configure the master/slave jumpers of the devices.
2) Select a device before you start giving commands to the
devices.

The head and device register has the bit you need to switch from
one device to another. You have to write the bit to either 0 for
master or 1 for slave and start controlling the other device.
Mind: BOTH devices will get their registers WRITTEN. Any data or
register READ will come from the selected device. ONLY the
selected device will execute commands.

This description should be about what you need to connect an IDE
disk to any controller. The only thing I have left out are my
unsuccessful experiments with the interrupt. What happened there
is that I enabled the interrupt, made an interrupt handler that
simply read the status register (to get the interrupt to
disappear) and re-scheduled the disk interface task. I was
rewarded with occasional errors. Some of the read requests got an
ABRT error. I do not yet know what I did wrong. I can not have
been far off the mark, because most of the commands where
executed without comment from the disk. I do intend to try the
interrupt modus again later. I theory the interrupt modus should
give me a slightly bigger data rate. I have found data rates in
the order of 32 KBytes per second when I was using interrupts.

About interrupts: When you want to use the interrupt mechanism
all you have to do is enable the interrupt modus of the interface
by clearing the interrupt disable bit in the reset and interrupt
register. The disk will generate an interrupts as soon as it
has completed a command. That means that it will generate an
interrupt when it has read a sector from disk (as soon as DRQ
gets active) or when it has finished writing a sector to disk. I
am not sure about the other commands, but the description says
that the disk will generate an interrupt upon the completion of
each command.

About the data rate. This IDE interface will never win any award
for its speed. It is in one word slow. I get data transfer rates
in the order of 25 KBytes per second. I spend most of the time
reading/writing data words from/to the disk on a word-by-word
basis under software control. On the other hand, my controller
has a total (RAM) memory of 24 KBytes. With the current interface
I can dump the complete memory to disk in less than one second.
That in itself makes me think that for this application the low
speed is not so much of an issue.

About the future. I think I will give interrupt modus another
try. Not because it gives me a fantastic data rate, I just can't
stand it that it does not want to work good.

I am thinking about a proper file system to put on the disk. That
will enable me to access the disk in a more normal way that the
current 'sea of sectors' approach I use now. A FAT filesystem
looks like an absolute horror when combined with a controller, so
I'll have to either find something that looks good to me or strap
something together myself.

I think I will give the ATAPI command set a try. I have just
found and printed the 'SFF committee specification of ATA Packet
Interface for CDROMs' (SFF-8020i) document. That document gives a
description of how to control an ATAPI CDROM via the IDE bus. On
the other hand: I would really not know what to begin with a
CDROM connected to a microcontroller. But what the heck, I have
no really good idea what to do with a microcontroller with a 40MB
harddisk connected..... I have seen occasional questions in this
mailing list about how to control a CDROM via its backside
connector: I think this IDE interface with an ATAPI piggy-back
software could just do the work.

Till now I've been concentrating on only one side of the
interface. The IDE interface is in fact no more than a
ready-decoded, buffered interface of a (mostly-PC) hardware
system. I could in fact connect god-knows-what at the other end.
I have an interrupt, DMA and I/O available, what else could you
ask for? A disk or CDROM is only one of the less inspired devices
you can connect to an IDE interface. Given the fact that modern
PC-motherboards have two IDE interfaces aboard I can think of
some nice things I'd like to connect to them. How about some 8
parallel input/output ports, how about a data acquisition system?

Lately I have been able to get a C-mos version of the 8255. My
controller system is quite low-power (10 mA for the entire
thing). I did not feel good about the IDE extension with a 8255
that used some 80 mA all by itself. The controller system with
the D71055C (a C-mos NEC version of the 8255) has gone down to
its normal -about 10 mA- power usage. the change from N-mos 8255
to C-mos D71055C has had no other noticeable effects than a lower
power usage.

Even when I have no disk connected to this contraption it
delivers me three 8-bits I/O ports. I am thinking about what
other things I could connect to that.

As you can see it is far from difficult to connect an IDE disk to
some computer. My implementation with a 8255 and an inverter chip
may not be the fastest thing on earth, it works, it's simple and
may be useable for many applications where a controller with a
large backup store could save the day.

I'll wrap this up with a case-study: The software I use on my
63B03 controller to control the IDE bus. I hope it can clarify
any points I have not covered in this description. I know this
software to work, I hope it can give someone inspiration to do
something similar on some controller system somewhere.

The software I use to control a single IDE harddisk using a 63B03
controller system and a 8255/74HC04 IDE interface.

Notes:

The interface program has been made on a 63B03 controller in
assembly code. The 63B03 code is nearly 6800 code. If in doubt,
consult some source of 6800 or 6803 or 63B03 instructions.

The source of the interface program is of course the most
complete description of how to program this interface, but
certainly not the most un-cryptic description. I try to program
without any 'dirty tricks' but who knows....

This interface program makes sporadic use of the underlying 63B03
real-time schedular. If you see a 'jsr Sys' somewhere that is
where I called the schedular to do something for me. As far as I
can see I only use Sys to produce a 10-ms delay. I have left the
code of the schedular itself out. Not because it is anything but
public domain, but because it is another 150 KBytes of source
file. This description is long enough as it stands here. The
schedular is not really needed, so I left it out. If you are
interested in the schedular as such, drop me a line (the address
is a little up in the text).

The IDE interface software as such I hereby donate to the public
domain. Use it as pleases you. Change it when you think it is
wrong, suffer the consequences if you make mistakes. I do not
take responsibility if you blow up harddisks, interface hardware
or if anything goes wrong when you use it. I have found it to
work on my system and, so sorry, that is all the guarantee I can
give you about it.

Started with the thing. The hardware has been
finished today. All seems to work. Now I need
software to get some life into it.

05-02-1998 :

Hit a bloody trick of the 8255: When you change
the modus byte ALL outputs are set to 0. I now
know why nobody wants to use this bugger. The
solution for this shit is easy: I plan to put an
inverter in all the control lines. The following
lines will be inverted:
/CS0, /CS1, /IORD, /IOW, /RES, IRQ (the latter
for the 63B03, it has a /IRQ input)..
This is the software change needed to make things
work again...

06-02-1998 :

Hardware change done, disk reset works
Started testing the disk interface functions.
The recalibrate command works too, the stop
disk/start disk functions seem to be not
present in this 40 MB disk. I also made a LBA
routine, I can now access the disk as a set of
sequential blocks, without counting heads etc..
It seems the PC hardware starts counting sectors
starting at 1 (WHY???), all other numbers start
at 0...

My disk (about 40 MB) tells me it has
980 cyls, 5 heads, 17 secs/track. In fact it does
tell me different numbers, only the label
indicates that it has been translated...

At this moment I only support disk block read
and disk block write. I want to make some file-
system too. Besides, this thing works code-bound.
I want to start using interrupts too...

08-02-1998 :

/IRQ hardware made ok. The disk can now generate
interrupts. These will come into the system via
the CPU's /IRQ signal. I even crashed the system
by giving /IRQ's with no handler in place...
Start making the disk software /IRQ-driven.

10-02-1998 :

Changed the interrupt generation/detection
software Found one nasty bug in the interrupt
usage as I did it: I first gave a disk reset on
the IDE bus, then started giving commends right
away. On this ONE occasion I do NOT have the
disk's interrupt facility available, the disk is
still executing its internal reset. I have to
wait for ready there, THEN start issuing
commands... Also set the bus control signals to
output BEFORE I start using the bus at all... Now
the interrupt mechanism works like the beauty it
is...

11-02-1998 :

Cleaned up the data transfer code. The disk I/O
was very slow due to very systematic code.
ReadWord/WriteWord code substituted in the
ReadBlock/WriteBlock code. Routines ReadWord/
WriteWord removed from the code. There was an
error in the writeword routine, I've removed it.

15-02-1998 :

I have given up about the interrupt-driven disk
control. It KEEPS on giving unexplained errors.
Does NOT want to work independently of the disk
type and is a general pain in the ass. What
exactly goes wrong I have no idea about. I now
use the scheduler's delay routines to get ready
status from the disk and that works fine. Both
the 40 MB disk and the 127 MB disk run like the
sunshine in this modus. The non-interrupt modus
does in fact not make any significant difference
for the transfer speed. I dropped from 32 KB/s to
25 KB/s. That is very acceptable for this
microcontroller. The controller is in this modus
a lot slower than the disk....

I'm now going to set the thing up for the 127 MB
disk with proper track/head numbers. Works ok
too.

Next test is with the 212 MB disk. I have to take
care that I stay below track 600 for this disk,
tracks 630 .. 660 are bad... Sunshine again..

16-02-1998 :

Made Identify working. It now dumps a nice
display of what the disk can do. My antique 42MB
disk gives only half an answer (and a wrong one
as well, it does NOT tell about the 5 heads,17
sectors translation it does..) but the other ones
like this ident command/display a lot. Also
shifted the buffers in memory a bit. I now want
to start writing to the disk (till now I have
only been reading...).
Ok, I really messed up the data on my 42 MB disk,
but it DOES write as well as read. I get back
what I have written, so far, so good. Now I have
to make:

A proper disk I/O task. That means that I have
to implement some way of communicating with
the disk I/O task. signals? I REALLY would
like to use some sort of mailbox mechanism.
For that I will have to extend my scheduler.

Some sort of file-system. I am already
contemplating a MFS (Microcontroller File
System) for some time now. It's about time to
start working on one..

18-02-1998 :

Started making task # 0E into a disk monitor.

I have left out the remainder of the code as it is fairly specific to the processor it
was written for.